Strengthening Northwest Vermont's local food System

Healthy Roots Prescription CSA Shares

As we begin to roll out the 2019 Healthy Roots Prescription CSA Shares, we reflect on the impact it had for folks in 2019. Fresh produce might not seem like life-changing material, but for Jami McDonald and her family some fruits and veggies led to large-scale change. In fact, the St. Albans resident credits access to a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) share with improving her family’s eating habits, health and wellness.

“It’s life-changing,” she said of the fresh produce she
began receiving this past July. “It’s been huge for us.”

The access to a weekly bag bursting with fresh, local
produce came at an incredibly opportune time for McDonald and her husband Wade.
In the spring, the couple lost their home in a fire that they were lucky to
escape with their lives. They woke up in the middle of the night to the sound
of windows exploding. Their fire alarms
didn’t go off because the fire started on the outside of the house and engulfed
the structure before the couple and their two-month-old daughter knew what was
happening.

McDonald grabbed her daughter Mila like a football and ran
down the stairs just as the roof caved in. She and her shell-shocked husband
kicked the back door open to get outside … “Watching everything we ever worked
for going up in flames,” she said.

After the fire, Dr. Jennifer Covino of Northwestern
Pediatrics who is Mila’s pediatrician, connected the family with the free share
of the CSA produce. The offering was part of an initiative of Healthy Roots, an
NMC program that seeks to strengthen the local food system. Healthy Roots
provided the free produce for pediatricians to give to patients – a pilot
program that may expand for the future. The free produce couldn’t have come at
a better time for the McDonalds, helping make life easier for the family as
they struggled to figure out how to move forward.

“We wouldn’t have been able to afford to go to the grocery
store and get the produce we needed,” said Jami. She noted that produce can be
the most expensive thing on a grocery list – and having easy access allowed her
to lose her “baby weight” and feel healthy during a very stressful time.

The share also spurred a change in her husband, who had high
blood pressure. She said he always found vegetables to be disgusting, but he’s
now regularly eating salad for dinner and seeing improvements in his blood
pressure. “I never once thought it would happen,” she said of their salad
dinners, jokingly asking him “Who ARE you?”

Simply put, the CSA made life easier. Each week, Jami picked
up her share at the convenient downtown location of City Hall – any time
between noon and 4 p.m. The pick-ups contained more than just fruits and
veggies. They also included a cutting board, a knife, a recipe book, fresh
herbs and free taste tests from the items in the week’s bag. The samples,
recipes and wide variety of produce led to experimentation and excitement. She
said she made an amazing pasta salad with arugula … even after her first though
was “WHAT IS THAT? I can barely say it!”

Changing her family’s eating habits was important to Jami as
she thinks about setting the stage for her daughter. “She’ll eat what we eat,”
she said, relishing the fact that she and Wade are now modeling such healthy
eating habits.

She is enthusiastic about the free CSA shares program and
recommends others try enrolling their families. She’s even interested in
sponsoring another family to receive a free share – she’d love to give back to
the program. “We’ll do whatever we can to keep it going,” she said.

Your donation helps our Healthy Roots glean team recover quality vegetables and fruits in Franklin & Grand Isle County by harvesting in fields on farms, picking up already harvested produce at farms, and after farmers markets. We deliver all of this excess produce to food shelves and meal sites. If you would like to support food access and increase local vegetable and fruit availability in Northwest Vermont, please donate here.

Your donations help us:

Purchase Harvest Tools to help glean all 10,600 lbs of produce we harvested last year.

Buy Gas for our vehicles to transport 1000 lbs of apples and 1100 lbs of acorn squash to food shelves all over franklin & grand isle county